Unlike GitHub, tweets should not be editable forever. I think 5 minutes is reasonable. Even HN has an edit time limit. I hope they also limit how much you can tweets (even though, in reality, adding 4 characters (“not ”) is destructive enough.

Do you think HTML pages should be uneditable after a period of time? Regardless of your opinion there (since I can see the merits), the rest of the web isn't exactly founded on immutability.

But Twitter doesn’t want to be just another webpage. Tweets and its dates are used in court and by historians. That’s basically why Twitter has been hesitant to allow edits.

I kinda wish they let people add some text instead of allowing editing, like:

    Wouldnt it be nice?

    Added: * wouldn’t

I know deletions are still allowed, but they don’t lead to different content.

I'm sure that web pages and their dates are used in court and by historians.

The web has archive.org for that. Or, ‘download webpage’ from a browser.

Archive.org works on twitter too?

> Archive.org works on twitter too?

Maybe if you're a famous celebrity etc. but it's scraped mine 5 times since 2007 (and the "expand conversation" links don't work) and I promise you that it has been fairly active ever since I signed up.

Is it Twitter's responsibility to be an accurate archive for courts and historians?

It’s not the responsibility, but if you read their post it’s obviously their concern.

I see the argument, though. Edits in a conversation break context and flow.

HN has edits, in conversation and flow, and it does break sometimes, but in general it's a good.

Discussion forums have had edits forever; reddit famously lets you go and delete all your existing posts at anytime by replacing them with "edited by autodeleter9000".

I think the other option would be to have a longer window, but then have edits of “popular” tweets require a manual review and approval.

Links and uploaded media should not be editable.

Then you need to hire humans and it costs money. An edit history is much cheaper.

> I hope it is going to be similar to editable comments on Github, with a dropdown to see older versions.

It took a while for them to add this. And amusingly, comments (including those opening issues and PRs) are a bit more like a wiki than personal comments—if you have the appropriate permissions, you can edit comments by others. For a long time you could do so with no visible record that it was done. Which is objectively terrible but was hilarious if you worked on a team with a good sense of humor and reasonable restraint.

Twitter Blue already has an undo tweet feature similar to Gmail's undo send so this new feature sounds like an edit after send.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue-featu...

Note that this isn't really an "undo", just a 5-60 second time delay before posting during which the user can change their mind before it's actually published.

Which is how most “undo” features work for email.

Since this is a verge article, can I also say I like their comment system? You get a minute or so to fix any typos after submitting after which it is locked in.

I think we have an hour on HN to edit but if someone responds to you it locks your comment. That seems reasonable to me too.

I'm not sure about that 2nd condition, I still have edit rights on my original comment.

There is a two hour edit window. Deleting comments is what is removed when a reply is made https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

This can and is already done by third party clients. Would be a very disapointing way to implement if done like that in the official client.